No more books about sex and drugs / It’s boring

  • “I think I just prefer to have sex than write about it.”—Umberto Eco in Paris Review
  • “the basic problem with “taipei” is that it’s premised on the mistaken belief that drug experiences are ever interesting or worth describing… in fact there’s nothing more boring to hear about, except maybe other people’s dreams or funny email spam. he makes the best of it but still.”—Leon Neyfakh (@leoncrawl on twitter)
  • (I think, though I can’t remember where, in one of the numerous interviews Richard Hell gave promoting his recent memoir, he said that someone—Patti Smith?—gave him the following advice: Just write about who was having sex with who.)
  • “If you set out to produce a parody of postfeminist mumbo jumbo, adolescent narcissism, excruciating erotic overshares, pseudopoetry, pretentious academic jargon, and shopworn and unshocking ‘dirty talk,’ you could not do better than Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell. One wishes that Katherine Angel, a historian of female sexual dysfunction at Warwick University, had, in fact, found this tale a little more ‘difficult to tell.’”—Cristina Nehring in Bookforum

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Few conversations are more exciting than “____ and ____ are totally fucking” or “I saw him last Tuesday in the back of Lit, alone, coked out of his mind.” At the same time, hearing these people describe these experiences would be painfully dull. I guess it’s because we all have a general idea of what sex and drugs are like, whereas we don’t know who’s doing what with whom? Or maybe these experiences are so intensive that they’re hard to communicate in an interesting, non-cliché way, and it’s this same intensiveness that makes us care who’s doing them? Either way, I think this also hints at a larger point, which is that gossiping is fun and other people’s emotions are largely uninteresting. 

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I wanted to be someone other than the humorless mother who had drug-tested him since he got caught with marijuana in eighth grade. After missing the signs of his pot smoking, and those of my former husband’s cocaine addiction years ago, my vow never to be duped again… The Facebook invitations stated in capital letters, “No drugs, no alcohol.” I hired security guards to search bags and patrol the grounds. I posted “no smoking” signs and photos comparing pink, healthy lungs with blackened, petrified lungs. I placed a few car-crash pictures on tables to highlight the fallacy of invincibility… Then, two uniformed police officers rang my doorbell. Within seconds, teenagers started streaming out the side gate. One officer led me by the arm into the empty backyard while the other opened the pool-house door. A cloud of marijuana smoke billowed out and kids, like cockroaches… Why? Because I got this party started… c) I will never, ever, host another party for teenagers again.

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   (via vicemag)   

bmichael › bmichael

bmichael: Say it, brother!! is it “capitalism”?

In the Declining Years of a Long War

One thing I’m left wondering by the PRISM revelation, assuming that people are actually reading our emails/Facebook chats/etc. (I’m skeptical, given what I know about the efficiency of government, that anyone is reading much of anything. This sort of seems like if one dude had access to an entire ocean and everything in it: Sure, he’d be able to scope out certain parts and do some major damage to a few things, but the vast majority would be left untouched and unseen. That doesn’t make this any less alarming, but it’s still something to consider.) is what happens if the NSA stumbles upon some non-terrorism-related crime? Presumably nothing, and I think we can all agree that this whole thing would be way scarier if the government was monitoring emails for general unlawfulness. Phrased a different way, however, I think this issue can make clear the huge disproportionality of our response to terrorism versus our response to other, more quotidian killings.

We can assume that if the NSA, in the course of reading emails or whatever, heard about a small-scale terrorist plot, one that would kill just a few people, it would act. (And it also seems to be the case that, in recent years, the majority of planned attacks would be much closer in scale to this than to 9/11.) If PRISM came across emails between drug dealers planning to murder their rivals, would they take action? What about a husband trying to contract the killing of his wife? Someone suggesting that they were going to drive home drunk? We can assume that the answer is “no”, and yet all of these situations pose a much greater threat to American lives than terrorism. Are only some lives worth saving? I’ve joked about it before, but seriously: the government would never dream of sending agents to bars to convince guys that they’re totally cool to drive home, only to arrest them on attempted vehicular manslaughter charges in the parking lot. Yes, terrorism is more unexpected and scarier to the general public, but I’d suggest that, to the person with steel ripping through their chest after their car’s been rammed by an out-of-nowhere drunk who just blew through a red light, or to the person, you know, murdered for whatever reason, these things are equally terrifying. Increased government surveillance, of course, is not the answer to these problems. Instead, as a democracy, we (in theory) create reasonable, codified laws that apply to everyone, and then as a society we accept that there’ll always be some level of risk and that not every death can be prevented. There’s no reason that we can’t treat terrorism the same way.

Truly This Is the Best of All Possible Basketball Worlds

The National Basketball Association’s playoff season is in full effect, and with that in mind, I’d like to talk about one thing that I think separates the NBA from all other professionally sports (and from pretty much all non-athletic careers too). Namely: I believe that the players in the NBA are not just the best basketball players in the United States, but the best possible basketball players as well. 

To understand what I mean by this, let’s compare basketball with a less popular sport. Fencing, maybe, or bobsledding. Few people have the chance to even try these activities once, let alone to practice them at the rate needed to become the top in their field. Beyond that, there is not a huge amount of celebrity or (presumably) money given to the world’s top bobsledders or fencers, which means that even naturals might be disinclined to stick with it unless they truly feel passion for the sport. It seems highly likely that there is a girl somewhere in Oxnard or Detroit or wherever who, had she just picked up a sword, would have been better than Lee Kiefer. Similarly, there is surely a boy who could have out-bobsledded Steven Holcomb, had he any idea what bobsledding really is and access to the proper facilities. Which is to say: In every other sport there exists persons who would be better than the sport’s current best player, if only they’d had the same upbringing.

Leave the wide world of sports and this becomes even clearer: The best writers, for example, are actually just the most talented of those people who have the time and means (not to mention schooling, proper upbringing, etc.) to spend huge amounts of time sitting and thinking and writing. For example, the 19th century undoubtedly lost more than one great novel because its writer was an illiterate factory worker who toiled away for 80 hours a week before prematurely succumbing to poverty-borne illness.

Basketball doesn’t have that same problem, largely because of the height of its stars. The average American male is 5’10”. The average NBA player is 6’7”. Think about how few people you know that are 6’7”. According to this low-tech statistics site I found, there are approximately 2.5 million American men over 6’4”, but we can expect that the majority of those are still below the 6’7” average NBA height*. There are only 135,000 over 6’7”, and around 3,500 above 6’10”. The height needed to excel in the NBA is rare, and when someone has it, it’s obvious. In America, there an exists an infrastructure that recognizes and encourages people who are this tall to pursue basketball. High school coaches seek out exceptionally tall students. Those with talent are further incentivized with the possibility of a college scholarship; the best college players enter the NBA. 

Obviously there isn’t a straight line between being tall and athletic and achieving success in the NBA. At the same time, though, it’s hard to imagine a 7’ athletic guy who never tried basketball. And if this guy was any good, it’s improbable that he wouldn’t have pursued the sport to the point where he’d the system that would eventually put him in front of those who would be in a position to make him a pro basketball player, should his talent warrant it. It stands to reason, then, that the NBA is comprised of the best possible basketball players.

Our society likes to think of itself as a strict meritocracy. It’s clearly not, but the NBA actually is. We live in a world filled with chance and what-ifs. Sometimes that’s great, but lots of times it isn’t. It’s incredibly reassuring to me that there exists one place where I know** that the best players are actually the best. So the next time you watch Lebron dunk, I want you to think about how you just saw the best basketball player possible do the best thing. That’s pretty cool.

*Yes, there are NBA players who aren’t exceptionally tall, but they’re a (sorry) small minority. Given that the best players, i.e. the ones whose names people who don’t pay attention to sports know, are all on the tall side (Michael Jordan’s 6’6”, Kobe’s 6’7”, Lebron’s 6’8”, Bird’s 6’9, Chamberlain’s 7’1, etc.) it seems unlikely that there’s a person of unexceptional height who could’ve been the best.

**To any reasonable extent. Yes, it’s totally possible to fall into an endless stream of hypotheticals (What if there was a kid who would’ve been the best but he died in a car accident at age 13? What if Michael Jordan’s dad had gotten a taller woman pregnant, and thus would’ve created an even taller son?). Beyond that, there definitely are some people who could’ve been great basketball players, but who found themselves unable or willing to play, due to outside circumstances. If we’re being reasonable though, I think it’s fair to assume that the currently NBA would fairly evenly overlap with the best possible NBA, and that the best player in the NBA (Lebron) is also the best possible basketball player.

In a sense, noise music is a lot like whiskey. This isn’t a statement about the intoxicating effects of sound, nor is it a comment on the stereotype that aficionados of both pursuits are smelly and wear sweats outside. Rather, it’s an extended, sort-of-terrible metaphor about acquired tastes. While you may hear people talking about tastes of oak and smoky hints and applewood and earthiness, the first time you drink scotch your reaction is much more likely to be “OW JEEZ my throat, why do people drink this on purpose?” Similarly, noise connoisseurs might cite jazz or Krautrock influences and dance rhythms, but, at least initially, noise and drone tend to mostly sound like really loud feedback. With enough exposure to the right stuff, though, you’ll start to notice nuances, and (hopefully) develop a taste for the stuff. In that sense, then, Drone Activity In Progress was sort of like a giant scotch tasting, but for noise music. I went to Red Bull Music Academy’s Drone Activity in Progress event in Queens and wrote about it for The Creators Project. I didn’t put this in the article, but I was extremely disappointed by the lack of free energy drinks at the event. Everything else was pretty cool.